urn:taro:tslac.50057Texas Legislature, House of Representatives, Committee of
the Whole House in Investigation of Charges Against Hon. J.T. Robison,
Commissioner of the General Land Office:An Inventory of Records at the Texas State Archives,
1929Finding aid by Nancy Enneking, July 2000This EAD finding aid was created in part with funds provided
by the Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund Board for the Texas
Archival Resources Online project.Texas State Library and Archives CommissionJuly 2000Text converted and initial EAD tagging provided by Apex Data
Services,
March 2001.Finding aid written
inEnglish.April 2001.Corrections and further encoding to TARO project standards by
Nancy Enneking, Tue Jul 22 15:38:42 CDT 2003urn:taro:tslac.50057 converted from EAD 1.0 to 2002 by v1to02.xsl (20030505).
Overview
Texas. Legislature.
House of Representatives. Committee of
the Whole House in Investigation of Charges Against Hon. J.T. Robison,
Commissioner of the General Land Office. Records1929Records consist of the
June 1929 proceedings, subpoenas, and correspondence of the Texas House of
Representatives' Committee of the Whole House in Investigation of Charges
Against Hon. J.T. Robison, Commissioner of the General Land Office.0.94 cubic
ftEnglish.
Restrictions on Access

None.

Restrictions on Use

None.

Preferred Citation

(Identify the item), Records, Committee of the Whole House in
Investigation of Charges Against Hon. J.T. Robison, Commissioner of the General
Land Office, House of Representatives, Texas Legislature. Archives and
Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Other Formats for the Records

The proceedings of the committee have been published in the Appendix
to the House Journal of the Second Called Session.

Agency History

The Texas House of Representatives' Committee of the Whole House in
Investigation of Charges Against Hon. J.T. Robison, Commissioner of the General
Land Office, was initiated by an unnumbered Simple House Resolution during the
Second Called Session of the 41st Legislature on June 6, 1929. The committee's
existence was the result of events that began in 1928.

According to the entry on Robison in the Online Handbook of Texas,
in November 1928 Governor Daniel J. Moody, members of the
board of regents of the University of Texas, and the state attorney general,
Claude Pollard, met with Robison and asked him to halt the sale of mineral
leases on land belonging to the permanent university fund until the legislature
could meet and instigate a system that would yield more money [due to the
discovery of oil on the land]. Robison proceeded with the sale of leases that
had already been publicly advertised, arguing that the law gave him no choice
in the matter. When the legislature met in January, the governor's supporters
empowered a special committee to investigate not only Robison's actions in this
case, but each and every act of the commissioner of the
General Land Office and all matters pertaining thereto.

The special committee was proposed by Senator Moore on January 11,
1929 in Senate Concurrent Resolution (SCR) 4 (Regular Session, 41st
Legislature). When the resolution was tabled, Senator Berkeley offered SCR 5
proposing a similar investigation - it too was tabled. On January 21, both
resolutions were brought up with the result that SCR 5 was permanently tabled
and SCR 4 was amended several times and approved. The resolution was sent to
the House and passed on January 23, and then sent to and signed by Governor
Moody on January 24. SCR 4 called for a joint committee of three
Representatives and two Senators; the members were Representatives Minor,
Stevenson and Bond and Senators Moore and Hardin. The committee, known as the
General (or Joint) Committee to Investigate the Land Office and Other State
Departments, heard from 35 to 40 witnesses and took 1,009 pages of written
testimony. Its report, submitted to the legislature on May 15, 1929 during the
First Called Session of the 41st Legislature, was critical of Robison's actions
in regard to the controversy with the governor and the regents, charged that he
mismanaged the re-appraisement of public school lands and a special-expenses
fund used to fund the 1925 re-appraisement, and accused him of accepting gifts
and gratuities from parties with interest in his policies. The committee termed
its results serious but left it to the legislature
as a whole to determine what course of action the legislature should take. The
committee also proposed that an Office of the State Auditor should be created,
as in fact occurred later in the First Called Session through House Bill
170.

It was at this point that the House took up the matter of the apparent
1925 re-appraisement discrepancies by passing an unnumbered simple resolution
offered by Representative Van Zandt on June 6, 1929, during the Second Called
Session. (The resolution passed was one of many offered over the course of
several days which variously proposed the reprimand, request for resignation,
and impeachment of Robison.) Specifically, Van Zandt's resolution called for a
House Committee of the Whole to investigate the management of approximately
$32,000 which was unaccounted for in the 1 cent per acre fund authorized by
Senate Bill 303 (39th Legislature, Regular Session, 1925) to pay for the
re-appraisement of public school lands. The committee was also to investigate
all other matters involving the official integrity of the Commissioner of the
Land Office. The Committee of the Whole House in Investigation of Charges
Against Hon. J.T. Robison, Commissioner of the General Land Office was thus
formed immediately after the adoption of Van Zandt's resolution; the committee
selected its own attorneys and allowed Robison to do the same.

The proceedings of the House Committee of the Whole began on June 10
and lasted through June 27, producing 1697 typescript pages of testimony and
evidence. On June 27 the Committee voted to approve a motion presented by
Representative Stevenson on June 26 to dismiss the charges against Robison
since no evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors existed.

During the time the House was
deliberating, the Handbook of Texas notes, the
Supreme Court, in a case arising from an injunction the attorney general had
obtained to halt Robison's sale of the leases, ruled that Robison had been
correct. He had no choice but to sell the leases already publicly advertised.
The court's ruling robbed the commissioner's opponents of a major part of their
case against him. Shortly after the House concluded the investigation, Robison
left Texas to visit his son in New London, Connecticut. His health was poor,
and the hearings had left him physically exhausted. In Connecticut he suffered
what doctors termed a nervous breakdown, and in late August he contracted
pneumonia. He died in a New London hospital on September 7, 1929.

Scope and Contents of the Records

Records consist of the June 1929 proceedings, subpoenas, telegrams,
and correspondence of the Texas House of Representatives' Committee of the
Whole House in Investigation of Charges Against Hon. J.T. Robison, Commissioner
of the General Land Office. The Committee investigated the management of
approximately $32,000, unaccounted for in the 1 cent per acre fund to pay for
the reappraisement of public school lands, and all other matters involving the
official integrity of the Commissioner of the Land Office. The proceedings
record the testimony and financial documents entered into evidence before the
committee from June 10 to June 27, 1929. The correspondence and majority of the
telegrams, from June of 1929, concern the request for and issuance of
subpoenas, the inability to locate several subpoenaed individuals, and a few
letters from individuals explaining their inability to comply with the
subpoenas. The subpoenas themselves, also from June of 1929, were sent to local
law enforcement officials. The officials served the subpoena on the named
individual(s) and then completed the lower portion of the subpoena stating the
time, date, and circumstances under which the subpoena was served.

To prepare this inventory, the described materials were cursorily
reviewed to delineate series, to confirm the accuracy of contents lists, to
provide an estimate of dates covered, and to determine record types.

Arrangement of the Records

The records are arranged by type of document, first the proceedings,
then correspondence and subpoenas; the subpoenas and correspondence are
unordered within the files.

Index Terms

The terms listed here were used to catalog the
records. The terms can be used to find similar or related records.

Additional records may also exist in
Archives of the Texas General Land Office.

Publications

Texas.
Appendix to the Journal of the
House of Representatives of the Second Called Session of the Forty-first
Legislature. Von Boeckmann-Jones Co., Austin, Tex., [1929?].
Texas.
Journal of the Senate of Texas
Being the Regular Session of the Forty-first Legislature. A.C.
Baldwin and Sons, Austin, Tex., [1929?].Texas.
Journal of the Senate of Texas
Being the First Called Session of the Forty-first Legislature.
A.C. Baldwin and Sons, Austin, Tex., [1929?].
Processing Information

Nancy Enneking, July 2000

Accession Information

Accession number: 2000/177

These records were transferred to the Archives and Information
Services Division of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission by an
unknown agency during the 20th century. According to the transcript of
proceedings, four copies of the proceedings existed. The committee recommended
that they be distributed among the Texas State Library, the University [of
Texas?] Library, the Texas Secretary of State, and the Texas Governor's Office.
It is possible that the Archives received these records from one, or more, of
these sources. A new accession number was assigned on July 27, 2000 for
purposes of control.